What's your damage?

I saw an article on MSN a few days ago, and unfortunately I can’t locate it any longer. It was obviously derived from the same study as this:

‘U.C.L.A.'s Mendez notes that the study provides evidence that people do not need cultural and social taboos to form morality. "Part of normal development is this emotional responding to another human being," he says. "It's not something you have to learn or you have to go have a specific religious experience to pick up, or have a cultural experience…. It is based on emotionally responding to others, and there's a part of the brain dedicated to that." '

It seems to me that this is the only part of it that stuck with the MSN writer. The upshot of the MSN version is that if you are capable of making moral yet emotionally detached decisions, you must be brain damaged.

I invite you to read the Scientific American article in full (linked from the post title), but here’s what it boils down to:

“Most people see the value in the utilitarian option of harming one if it protects scores of others. But there is also a significant emotional component given that the decision involves hurting another human being. Some neuroscientists theorize that the choice ultimately comes down to a moral tug-of-war between compassion and cold reasoning.
According to a new report, published in Nature, damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC)—a region in the forebrain associated with emotional response—can blunt a person's emotional response to sacrificing a single person to save many others.”

There is significant peril in making associations, and this points to one possibility, however the Scientific American article is much more complete, and makes a good, supported case. Personally, I think that a lot of our trepidation about hurting people for good reason is the result of “cultural and social taboos” as much as a lack of damage to a specific part of our brain, but of course I can’t prove that. There are a hell of a lot of suicide bombers who seem to back up my hypothesis however…

It comes as no surprise to me of course that a lightweight mainstream media source should simplify something to the point of stupidity, and this sort of thing helps explain why so many people are so poorly informed about what happens in the world. Any of you who read this are by definition fighting that trend, since I am usually at odds with stuff that I get from the major news sources.

My main problem with the initial piece (wish I could find it) was that it as much as said that if you were capable of making an unpleasant decision, you must be brain-damaged. Being someone quite capable of squelching my squishy impulses in times of crisis, I naturally take offence to this. The SciAm statement about a “tug-of-war” makes a lot of sense to me, and you don’t need a sharp blow to the head to be able to make a difficult decision.

Sure, if something removes your emotional connection to it, it becomes easy, obvious, really, to do the raw math and make a decision accordingly. However, there are a lot of situations that I can foresee that will have to be dealt with by people whose brains are physically intact, but require a “Mr Spock” solution.

Without the convenient brain damage to provide clarity, you must make the necessary decisions, and do so knowing it’s the right thing to do. Nobody ever said making the tough decisions was easy, but I guess that’s a test of character for us, isn’t it?